Metaadata Essay

2896 Words6 Pages

Introduction

“According to Forrester Research, American workers spend $404 billion annually, or 11% of all U.S. wages, looking for the information they need to do their jobs. Giving employees the right tools to stay afloat in a data and knowledge-driven workplace is imperative across the board.”[1]

With the world of digital data growing exponentially year on year, the above quote could just represent a mere drop in the ocean when accounting for the time workers spend looking for information. The next question is, once the information has been found, can it then actually be interpreted and understood within its original context and in the context required? Without adequate systems to deal with the data deluge, and efficient working …show more content…

However metadata can also be costly and time consuming, especially if the human element of inputting the information is the primary way of getting the data into the files. Automation of the population of metadata fields is desirable, and with new technologies this is achievable, however it should be ensured that the right information is going into an asset. If a user is searching for a specific thing, then the system should know that the result it returns is the right one, and often this can only be done by human intervention when adding metadata. To aid with this, certain machine readable metadata fields, such as technical information about a file, can be automated upon

ingestion to a DAM, however descriptive information can be much more subjective. This conceptual thought around the description of a file can limit its discovery, as can a lack of knowledge about it in terms of the individual populating any descriptive metadata fields. This is where prescribing to the thoughts of writers such as Bearman [5] around allowing users to describe records as they are the ones with the relevant knowledge, can be very useful, but depending upon the institutions workflow it may also be impractical. Whatever metadata scheme is used, it must be properly structured to ensure it aids discovery, and displays all the information relevant to both the file and the

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